Original subtitles

The solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago.

How was earth's moon produced?

What is its history?

It was hoped that lunar rocks would help solve that mystery.

The Apollo 11 mission in 1969

marked the beginning of direct

human exploration on the moon.

During six missions,

382 kilograms of lunar rock were collected.

Transporting all that from far-flung locations

on the moon's surface required a lot of power.

Apollo 15 finally developed the answer,

the lunar roving vehicle.

Moving about freely on the moon's surface,

this lunar rover could take astronauts's farther a field

than they could go on foot.

However, developing the rover was very much a matter

of trial and error.

The lunar soil would be very different from earth's.

Engineers had to develop a vehicle that could operate on

all kinds of terrain.

Weighing just 200 kilograms but capable of carrying

a 500 kilogram load.

A super car that would be used to locate and transport rocks

on the surface of the moon.

It was a great vehicle.

They did a wonderful job in building it,

you know, especially for those days.

It's hard to believe now we're talking how long ago?

40 years, 30 years, what are we talking?

The last flight in the Apollo program

was Apollo 17.

On this mission, NASA finally included

a scientist astronaut.

This was a final chance to investigate

on the moon's surface, a gamble that they could discover

lunar materials of types never found before.

They succeeded far beyond their expectations.

Finding traces of the moon's dramatically violent past.

This is the story of how the Apollo program

developed a vehicle that could drive around

on the moon collecting rocks and soil

that revealed billions of years of history.

From time in memorial, people have cast

longing glances at the moon.

And wished for a chance to travel there.

The first person to make that dream come true

was the brilliant rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun.

He led the Apollo Program which actually landed

men on the moon.

A decade before the start of the Apollo Program,

von Braun's conceptualizations of space development

were carried in a magazine.

At a time when it wasn't even known if humans

could traverse the distance to the moon and back,

his blueprints for space development were bold and detailed.

Each and every conceptual drawing overflowed

with von Braun's enthusiasm for space travel.

Exploration on the moon's surface was also included.

A major role was to be played by lunar rovers.

They were to function somewhat like the covered wagons

that blazed trails through the American West.

Clearly, even before space travel began in earnest,

a lunar vehicle was conceived of as essential

to exploration on the moon's surface.

The latter half of the 1950's saw the start of a space race

between the United States and the Soviet Union.

These two super powers staked their prestige

on efforts to launch artificial satellites.

In 1961, the Apollo program was launched

with von Braun playing a central role.

The next year, development of a lunar vehicle began.

Its construction preceded in tandem with development

of the Apollo rocket engines themselves.

The best regarded prospect from that phase of development

has been preserved,

the MOLAB or Mobile Laboratory built in 1964.

The tires were huge.

The vehicle was nine meters long and weighed three tons.

The inside was spacious.

The design permitted two astronauts

to live and work there for two weeks.

The steering wheel and foot pedals were the same size

as in ordinary passenger vehicle.

Development was spear headed by two representatives

of America's largest auto manufacturer,

Chief Engineer Ferenc Pavlics

and Team Leader Samuel Romano.

Development went smoothly,

but this rover never made it to the moon's surface.

The problem was that massive body.

NASA realized that they would need another rocket

just for the rover in addition

to the one carrying the astronauts.

In 1966, the year before the scheduled

first trip to the moon,

development on the lunar rover was suspended.

It was a setback that the developers

waited for another chance.

Our job is laid out for us, our test is laid out for us.

But we didn't have any problems,

we didn't think that we couldn't do it.

It was our job to get it done and we had it done.

In March 1969,

faced with the upcoming launch of Apollo 11,

the two men went to inspect the completed lunar module

or landing craft.

They knew that their only hope of getting a rover

on to the moon would be abort the lunar module.

But the lunar module had no space to spare

except for one unused compartment they spotted.

It was a recess just 1.5 meters square

and 0.9 meters deep.

When we first saw this, it's impossible.

We couldn't fit this large vehicle in that space.

But Pavlics, the engineer did not give up.

He tried to see how compact

he could make the rover.

To carry two astronauts, it had to be at least

three meters long.

To get around on the moon's rock terrain surface,

it had to have large tires.

But any way they calculated it,

it was too big to fit on the lunar landing module.

Was there no way to get it on to the lunar module?

For three months they experimented with mock-ups.

Then one day.

It's usually these ideas come very suddenly, you know.

A eureka!

What was the sudden inspiration?

Pavlics demonstrates with a one sixth model.

The seats must be folded down.

Then the front chassis which is hinged

is folded over 180 degrees.

Then the same with the rear chassis is folded up,

then the wheels are folded in to a 45 degree angle.

And then the complete assembly

fits into that triangular shaped envelope

which is between two legs of the lunar landing module.

It was ingenious.

A foldable vehicle was a huge step toward

including a rover in the moon landing mission.

Two weeks before the scheduled launch of Apollo 11,

the two men took their model to NASA

for a demonstration.

When we went to Huntsville and

the engineering people were very excited

that maybe this could work.

So one of the engineers said

why don't we show it to Dr. von Braun

who was the director of the Hunstville NASA Organization.

Von Braun had the final say

on lunar rover development.

They had to arouse his interest and enthusiasm.

Pavlics had an idea how to do that.

So he led the way to von Braun's office,

opened the door, and I guided the vehicle

into his office with radio control

that he couldn't see anybody but this little vehicle

coming into his office.

And he was on the telephone,

saw this little thing coming then,

and put the telephone down and say, "What is this?"

And then we walked into the office,

explain to him what the concept is,

demonstrated all the folding up.

Von Braun listened intently.

Then suddenly.

He slammed his hand on a table, he said,

we must do this, we must run the vehicle on the moon.

And we convinced him, convinced NASA

to go ahead and do it.

And we got a contract to do it.

The lunar rover concept

championed by the two men had previously been scuttled.

Now, they've been given a second chance.

Two weeks later, Apollo 11 was launched.

The entire world awaited the moon landing

with bated breath.

The rehearsals for the Apollo Program

of putting men on the moon and bringing them back

were over.

This was the real thing.

Three months later, the lunar rover project

began in earnest.

It had a new and powerful supporter, Saverio Morea.

Morea was a capable manager who had overseen

the successful development of the Apollo Program's

giant rocket engines.

All they do to send out the next model car,

it takes them like four years before they're happy

with the design and they can finally put one out

on the street that's different.

We had to produce flight hardware for astronauts

in a totally unknown environment in 17 1/2 months.

Starting with Apollo 11,

NASA was planning on about one moon landing

every six months.

Apollo 15 was scheduled to undertake

full scale research on the moon's surface in 1971,

just two years away.

The lunar rover would have to be operational

for that mission.

The contract required development and production

within a mere 18 moths.

This vehicle would be the first ever to run on a surface

other than planet earth's.

It was a tough schedule but they started development

by trial and error.

The first requirement was the capability to roam freely

over the moon's rough terrain.

The lunar rover would be useless unless it could easily

surmount obstacles as high as 30 centimeters.

The vehicle utilized technologies that were

still unavailable to vehicles on earth.

It was an electric car whose four wheels

were powered by dedicated motors

drawing on two silver zinc batteries.

The four motors put out a combined total

of one horse power.

That was enough for the moon whose gravity

is only one sixth that of earth's.

Operation was simplified.

The manual controller had steering,

acceleration, and braking functions

all there at the driver's fingertips.

Later, to accommodate the bulkiness of the astronaut's

space suits, the controller was reconfigured to a T shape.

So the driver's hand could rest on it comfortably.

The design goal was operational ease.

Maneuvering the rover was simple,

tilt the controller forward to start moving.

Tilt right, it turns right.

Tilt left, it turns left.

Pull back to engage the brake.

Push the button and pull back to put it in reverse.

In test runs, actual astronauts checked out

every feature very carefully.

It functioned superbly.

Everyone agreed development had gone well.

Morea, however, spotted a surprising flaw.

Not so much the vehicle itself

but how the man would interact with the vehicle

like hours in a one-sixth G environment.

But what would it be like

on the surface of the moon?

No one could predict that.

So they tested the rover's seats inside a large airplane

which was flown so as to simulate one-sixth

of the earth's gravity.

This is the footage of that experiment.

The astronaut flops about and can't get seated.

There was no point in having a rover one could not ride.

But this problem was solved with a little ingenuity,

a 15 centimeter bolt protruding from the floor

of the car body.

The astronaut could then hook

his foot briefly under the bolt,

levering himself onto and into the seat.

Problem solved.

That was the big one.

Simple solution but big issue.

This was not simplistic, this was a space craft on wheels.

April 1970, by now they had reached Apollo 13.

But the lunar rover had run into a seemingly

impassable developmental wall.

The problem, the material and shape of those huge tires.

In the vacuum of space, pneumatic rubber tires

would blow out, they were simply not practical.

What's more?

On the moon temperatures in the sun and in the shade

can vary by as much as 270 degrees Celsius.

The tires had to withstand harsh environmental conditions.

The terrain scarred from the impact of countless

small meteorites is uneven, full of pot holes.

But in some places, the soil is finely

granulated like powder.

The tires would have to do well

on that sort of terrain as well.

They needed something strong,

resistant to temperature fluctuations.

They thought of a material quite unsuitable

for terrestrial tires, metal.

It should be flexible because it is carrying people,

so the right characteristic had to be such

that cannot be rigid wheel.

So we came up with this idea of making

a flexible wheel making it out of spring material.

So they created 10 types of metal wheels

or tires and tested each and every type.

It had to be lightweight and suited to any terrain.

It also had to give a comfortable ride.

This is the one they finally chose.

Metal filaments were woven together

at four millimeter intervals.

This was a wire mesh tire.

This wheel is a very good

simulation of an actual tire.

It yields as you press on it and returns.

And it has enough strength to carry the

load, weight of the vehicle.

So it seems like,

and it can't blow out.

Romano's team had overcome their greatest obstacle.

Where does a wire mesh tire get its strength

than versatility?

Kazuya Yoshida, who helped developed

the Japanese asteroid explorer Hayabusa,

ran some tests.

He fabricated two 15 centimeter diameter wire mesh tires

and attached them to a small testing unit.

A rock was inserted in the test bed to create

a three centimeter high obstacle.

How will the tires perform?

The test unit easily negotiates the obstacle.

When tire meets rock,

the tire changes shape to accommodate the rock.

That suppleness in the wire mesh tire

allowing it to diverse both rocky ground and softer soil,

is exactly what is needed on variable terrain

like the moon's.

The rover was now outfitted with wire mesh tires.

The next step was to simulate lunar conditions

for full scale testing.

One trick was to have the rover lifted slightly

by a crane as it ran

so it would be one-sixth of its real weight

as it would be on the moon.

Only after it passed numerous performance tests

was the lunar rover deemed ready.

Just four months before the scheduled flight of Apollo 15,

the lunar rover was packed into the side

of the landing module.

And NASA was setting a new plan in motion.

The moon's surface has both dark colored

and light colored areas.

Up to Apollo 14, the moon landings had all been

on the dark areas.

They are called seas and they are flat.

That made them relatively safe for landing.

But the only kind of rock they could find

in such places was basalt.

There's plenty of that on earth.

So Apollo 15 would approach one of the light areas instead.

The plan was to set the lunar module down

near the edge of a dark sea

and then have astronauts set out in the rover

for brighter higher ground.

NASA had not yet obtained any rocks

from the moon's high lands.

July 26th 1971, with the lunar rover on board

for the very first time, Apollo 15 took off for the moon.

Taking the rover made this a historic flight,

one that marked the beginning of true lunar exploration.

Four days later, the Falcon Lunar Landing Module

set down safely on one of the moon's seas

near a mountain range.

They were about to realize the fruits

of a year and a half of development.

An astronaut held the rope that would release

the lunar rover from its cargo bay.

Back at admission control,

the two men who had worked so hard

to develop the rover held their breath.

The rope is yanked hard.

And the rover begins to emerge.

All it took was one quick pull for the rover

to start to deploy.

In just five minutes, there was the lunar rover

ready to roll.

But then came something unforeseen.

There was no front steering at all.

Oops, yeah, it's an oops.

As a matter of fact,

within minutes, I got a call from the vice president

from Detroit, General Molters,

that what's going on, can you fix the problem?

So it was a high visibility time for operation.

No front steering could have been

a serious setback.

But the rover had a built in feature that saved the day.

The front and rear wheels actually operated in tandem,

in a four wheel steering system.

To turn right for example,

the front wheels would point right

and the rear wheels would point left,

all four contributing to the turn.

On Apollo 15, the front wheels did not steer

when first powered up, but the independently

powered back wheels still operated sufficiently

for the vehicle for be maneuvered.

40 minutes later, the rover was declared

ready to explore the moon.

Average speed, 12 kilometers per hour.

The two astronauts riding the rover

were just ecstatic.

Then suddenly, they realized they could no longer

see the lunar module.

Since the moon is only one fourth the size of earth,

travelling three kilometers as they had

put them beyond the horizon.

But that was no cause for alarm.

They had built-in technology that gave them

distance and angle to the lunar module.

The first ever lunar car navigation system.

With no fear of getting lost,

they were emboldened to go even beyond the site lines

to the lunar module.

On the second day of exploration,

they made a great discovery.

It was while the rover was on route to higher ground.

The two explorers were at the edge of a vast crater.

It was a white rock which they called

The Genesis Rock.

The high lands were composed of rock that formed

shortly after the moon itself was born.

Hither to the lunar seas had yielded only black basalt.

What Apollo 15 retrieved from the high lands

was a white rock called anorthosite.

This discovery made it possible to construct a scenario

explaining how the moon achieved its current shape

and characteristics.

4.6 billion years ago,

the solar system had only just taken shape.

Right after the earth itself was born,

a body the size of Mars collided with it.

This giant impact, as its called,

blew avast cloud of debris out into space.

The fragments were gravitationally attracted

to each other and fused in repeated process.

The result was the moon.

As it took final shape, the moon was covered in magma,

molten rock heated by the energy from all those collisions.

In time as the moon cooled,

white anorthosite began to crystallize in the interior.

With a relatively low specific gravity,

the anorthosite gradually moved to the surface

where it formed the moon's crust.

So at one point, it is thought the moon was entirely white.

Then however, the solar system was struck

by a vast swarm of meteoroids.

Impacts on the moon created giant carters.

They punctured across through which magma

pushed up from the moon's core onto the surface.

The magma, now lava, cooled in the form of black basalt.

This is how the moon's seas were formed.

This account of the formation of the moon

is based on discoveries made possible

by the lunar rover.

In April 1972, Apollo 16 was launched.

On this mission, too, the rover played a major role.

It scampered easily over the moon's rough terrain.

And it covered a total of 27 kilometers.

10 times farther than an astronaut could have walked

in the same time period.

The lunar rover had proved to be indispensable

to the Apollo Program's moon based exploration.

Suddenly, it was the last Apollo mission.

NASA hoped for a spectacular new discovery.

The objective was a gorge cut into steep mountains.

This terrain was far more complicated

than any attempted before.

There was a good chance some strange new rocks

would be discovered.

And it was their last chance.

So in Apollo 17, NASA sent in a ringer.

For the first time, a scientist was aboard.

A geologist named Harrison Schmitt.

Nowadays, more astronauts than ever before

have professional backgrounds in science and engineering.

Their expertise is valued

for conducting experiments in space.

But on the Apollo Program,

given the extraordinarily complex operational requirements,

all the astronauts except for Schmitt

were military pilots.

Schmitt had been fascinated by space since childhood

but he became a geologist.

His chance to venture into space

came when he was 29 years old.

It was on very short notice.

The NASA and the National Academy of Sciences

asked for volunteers for scientists

to become astronauts in November of 1964.

And I thought for about 10 seconds and decided

that I would regret not volunteering and so I volunteered.

Schmitt had never piloted anything

more complex than an automobile.

But NASA drummed new operational skills into him.

Apollo 17 was the last chance to discover new moon rocks.

Capitalizing on that chance was up to Schmitt.

December 7, 1972,

with one lunar rover and one scientist on board,

this was Apollo's last chance.

Schmitt was given the responsibility of piloting

the lunar landing module.

Four days later, they had reached lunar orbit.

The lunar module separated from the command module

and began its descent to the surface.

Carefully, they descended to a narrow gap

between steep mountain ridges.

In the end, Schmitt and his crew mates

made a successful landing.

They had landed perfectly

in the middle of the valley.

Surrounded by this magnificent scenery,

the normally calm Schmitt could not conceal

his excitement.

Through all those who made it possible.

Really would be great to go to this valley,

this deep mountain valley.

It's deeper than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

I mean, it was a very deep valley.

It was splitting the ring of mountains around this

large basin called Serenitatis.

And it had these young volcanics,

it had a lot of very attractive thing.

Schmitt and another astronaut

boarded the rover right away and set off to investigate.

They traveled west to a point 3.5 kilometers

from the lunar module.

Right in front of them was a crater more than 100 meters

in diameter.

Schmitt's instincts as a geologist told him

to focus his attention on this crater.

There, on the generally monotone surface

of the moon undeniably was orange sand.

This was a discovery that contradicted all

the conventional wisdom.

It was so unusual and so colorful compared to

what you normally see on the moon.

We were certainly excited about it.

And I think Everybody in mission control

was excited about it too because it was so unexpected.

The geologist and mission control

could not conceal their enthusiasm either.

Until then, there had been no indication

that there had ever been volcanic activity on the moon.

A close look at the sand reveals

tiny gloves of glass, 0.1 millimeters across.

They called it orange glass.

It was a volcanic deposit of what we call

a pyroclastic deposit.

Certainly, people in Japan are very familiar with

the volcanoes that erupted and throw glass

and debris around.

Well, this had happened on the moon.

The orange glass was created 3.6 billion years ago.

At the bottom of the crater made by a meteorite impact,

magma spewed forth from the moon's core.

A fire fountain sprayed droplets of magma

from 400 kilometers below the crust

out into the cold of space where they instantly cooled

into globules of glass.

Schmitt and his colleagues had discovered

irrefutable evidence of volcanic activity on the moon.

36 years later, the Japanese unmanned

lunar explorer, Kaguya, photographed the moon's surface

with a special camera.

It identified more than 40 locations on the moon

where there were sand with the same composition

as the orange glass.

This confirmed that the moon, like earth,

had seen a great deal of volcanic activity.

Schmitt and his fellow crew members

returned as heroes.

The 11 year Apollo Program was now at an end.

Thanks to the lunar rover,

great achievements had been made in lunar exploration.

And there is a little known fact

underlying this grand finale.

We were told later on that

without the rover

NASA or the government would have cancelled

the last three or at least two Apollo flights.

So it was in a sense the rovers

saved the last three of the Apollo flights

because it was a new element in the exploration.

The riddle of the moon's origin

was solved by The Genesis Rock and orange glass.

And it was the lunar rover that led to these discoveries.

It's been 40 years since the end of the Apollo Program.

But research is still being done on the rocks

brought back from the moon.

New facts are even now coming to light.

Alberto Saal is an associate professor of Geological

Sciences at Brown University in the US.

He's using earth's latest technology to study

the moon's orange glass.

When the magma spewed out of those lunar craters,

it instantly formed glass globules that incorporated

substances from the moon's core.

That makes them time capsules

of the very origin of the moon.

Analysis yielded unanticipated results.

Trapped in the orange glass were some of the

same gases that exist on earth

such as fluorine and chlorine.

This supported the theory that the moon

came from the earth.

Another completely unanticipated substance was found.

Water.

This was the first ever proof

that there was water on the moon.

When earth suffered the giant impact

that gave birth to the moon, the fragments of earth

dislodged into space were heated to 4,000 degrees Celsius.

It had been thought that all the water

would have evaporated.

But where had the moon's water come from?

Currently, the world's only isotope microscope

is being used to analyze the moon rocks

to solve that very riddle.

Hisayoshi Yurimoto has been conducting research

of this sort including analysis of the

Apollo mission's moon rocks.

That includes measurements of deuterium,

a hydrogen isotope.

Amounts differ depending on the type of space object

in which they are found.

The water in the moon rocks contains

from 0.02 to 0.03% deuterium.

Comparable amounts of deuterium are found

in another well known type of space object, comets.

In the solar system of four billion years ago,

there were many more comets than there are now

passing through.

Yurimoto believes that the moon was showered

with a huge quantity of comet ice in that era.

When the comets passed too close to the sun,

at that time, it recouped some of the water

lost after the event of the giant impact.

Since the Apollo missions,

no one has walked on the moon,

but plans are underway now for new moonwalks.

In 2009, the US launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

or LRO.

It is parked in lunar orbit 21 kilometers

above the moon from which it photographs the surface.

This is an effort to compile detailed information

for the next people who attempt to conduct investigations

on the moon's surface.

This is one of the images captured by the LRO.

It's the Apollo 17 lunar landing site.

Those spidery lines marked where the lunar rover

scatted across the moon's surface.

Their tracks remained even now.

At the end of one of those tracks,

a lunar roving vehicle no longer roving.

The rover was a major player in moon explorations

of an earlier era.

Now, it sits there patiently

waiting to greet new explorers from earth.